Blacks seek redress over apartheid evictions

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Blacks evicted from parkland are now being compensated
for their loss, reports Sahm Venter in Johannesburg.

Generations of white South Africans recall spending grindingly
boring childhood hours in hot cars being bribed by their parents to
spot animals in the Kruger National Park.

Their black counterparts were mainly spared this inconvenience.
Those who did brave the park in the heyday of apartheid suffered
the humiliation of being offered crude, blacks-only
accommodation.

Black South Africans were encouraged to holiday elsewhere in the
decades before the park welcomed everyone in the late 1980s.

Nowadays a visit to Kruger is de rigueur for the hordes of
foreign visitors who lap up the punishing heat in order to see the
Big Five - buffalo, lion, elephant, rhinoceros and leopard.

Little do they, or many South Africans for that matter, know
that whole communities of black people were swept out of the way to
allow the park to expand to its full grandeur.

Millions of black South Africans were removed from their land
from 1913, and again in the 1950s, when the separation of blacks
from whites accelerated.

Like their counterparts throughout the country, the village folk
of the then Lowveld - savanna lands - were simply kicked out of the
designated park area.

Not surprisingly, these people, who live in abject poverty near
the park, now want their land back. A perfectly natural desire
since the advent of democracy in 1994 gave them full citizenship in
the country of their birth and the new government enacted various
laws to redress past imbalances.

The Restitution of Land Rights Act is one of them. It allows
people to stake a claim to land that they or their ancestors had
occupied. If the claim can be verified, the law allows for the land
to be returned to them, or a cash payout or some benefit from
another arrangement.

A good example is the 1700-strong Maluleke clan. They were
forced from their land in 1969 by the apartheid government to make
way for the expansion of the park. And, just for good measure, the
authorities made them burn down their huts as they left.

In 1998, the Maluleke people had the title deeds to their
24,000-hectare homeland returned to them but, instead of living
there, the community of 5000 helps run a $A10 million ecotourism
site and shares in its profits. The move has changed their lives
and keeps conservationists happy.

Another 37 similar claims to various parts of the park are under
consideration but, like the Maluleke, successful claimants will not
live on the land from which they were removed.

Those whose petitions can be verified by the Land Claims
Commission, which has in the past 10 years settled more than 57,000
claims, could be paid out or share in a similar tourism deal.

This is thanks to an arrangement between environment watchdogs
and the commission that means that no one will return to live on
land earmarked for conservation.

So the land that was incorporated into a park at the behest of
one-time Transvaal president Paul Kruger in 1898 - to protect
animals from zealous European big-game hunters and then opened to
tourists in 1927 - will remain a wildlife sanctuary. And perhaps
everyone involved will reach an acceptable deal.